Monetary reward increases attentional effort in the flanker task

An important question is whether monetary reward can increase attentional effort in order to improve perfor-mance. Up to now, evidence for a positive answer is weak. Therefore, in the present study, the flanker task was used to examine this question further. Participants had to respond sooner than a certain deadline in a flanker task. One group of participants received a performance-contingent monetary reward, whereas the other group earned a fixed amount of money. As a result, monetary reward significantly improved performance in comparison with the control group. The analysis of speed-accuracy trade-off functions revealed that monetary reward increased attentional effort, leading to an enhanced quality of stimulus coding. Little evidence was found that reward also improved selective spatial attention. Because cognitive capacity is limited, it is economical for an organism to mainly allocate its resources to mental activity that is important for its survival or relevant for attaining its current goals. It is widely assumed that two attentional control systems serve this objective. The first system encompasses bottom-up mechanisms that auto-matically allocate attentional resources to the processin